Dr David O'Shaughnessy B.A. (Dublin), M.A. (N.U.I.), D.Phil (Oxon)
Assistant Professor
David studied English and French at TCD before completing an MA in Culture and Colonialism at NUI, Galway. He subsequently wrote his DPhil thesis on the theatre of William Godwin at the University of Oxford in 2007.
After completing his doctorate, he was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College, University of Oxford where he co-edited the diary of William Godwin (http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk) which was awarded the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Digital Prize for 2012. He also published William Godwin and the Theatre (2010) and a complementary edition of Godwin’s plays from manuscripts held at the Huntington Library in California and the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the latter facilitated by a Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr Research Grant awarded by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
David then took up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Warwick where he began work on the representation of the ‘Stage Irishman’ 1780-1830. While at Warwick he organised a conference on the London Irish in the eighteenth-century and he is currently editing a collection of essays from that conference for the journal Eighteenth-Century Life. He is also the special subject editor for theatre on the forthcoming 20-25 volume edition of the diary of Henry Crabb Robinson, the Romantic and Victorian man of letters, to be published by Oxford University Press (2017-27).
His current monograph project is looking at the work of minor Irish playwrights who worked in London in the long eighteenth century. This book will consider the scope of those playwrights’ political ambition and what their plays might be able to tell us about the Irish diasporic experience in eighteenth-century London. He is also interested in British radicalism of the 1790s, Romantic period theatre (and eighteenth-century theatre more widely), the Jacobin novel, clubs and societies in the eighteenth century, and eighteenth-century Dissenting culture. He welcomes enquiries from prospective PhD students in any of these areas.
David teaches on the ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Romanticism and Revolution’, and ‘Realism and the Novel’ freshman courses and offers sophister options on eighteenth-century theatre and the Revolution debate in 1790s Britain. He also teaches seminars on the eighteenth century for the MPhil in Irish Writing.
Contact:
Dr David O'Shaughnessy
School of English
Arts Building
Trinity College Room
Dublin 2
Room 5090
Telephone (+353 1 8964721)
Office Hours: Monday 4.00-5.00 p.m. & Tuesday 4.00-5.00 p.m.
Email: doshaug@tcd.ie